I am a writer, too, kinda.
I am also writing a novel.
I’m working on a novel.
I also write.
I’ve been working on this novel.
These were the phrases always trotted out when I had a desk job and never had the mental state or time to write. For years, I had countless beginning drafts of a novel languishing in my Google Drive—I had always wanted to write fiction, but my body was slowly falling to the inertia of a monotonous work-life routine. I would wake up and prepare myself for the day, commute on a train to work hunched over the distractions of my phone, sit at a desk job for the better part of the day, occasionally go and meet friends afterward, sleep, and repeat. My mind was always exhausted from the labor of filing and responding to endless emails, attending meetings, and coming up with creative copy for a marketing job. Yoga just barely kept me from burning out. The three pages of the beginnings of a novel collected digital dust.
Excerpt from Volume 21, now available
Banner photo of Rafael Vargas in Costa Rica by Sol Sun Media.
But then I discovered rock climbing, and my body was thrown out of its usual orbit. I had to figure out how to move vertically, how to twist my body against gravity, how to find force in my fingers, which previously had only been used to type on keyboards. The introduction of this movement sparked the beginning of a massive change in how I approached writing.
The first time I bouldered inside, my usually anxious and busy mind turned quiet and focused, trying to figure out the problem before me. The intense concentration to the physical plane of existence freed my mental prison of writer’s block. That night I went home and wrote about the experience, invigorated by how differently I could see the world just by moving differently in it. As I built up the strength in my fingers on the wall, they became more powerful on the page. If I hadn’t started climbing, I wouldn’t be a full-time writer now.
Becoming a climber made me realize that the best rewards in life are the ones that come when you take risks with persistence. I always wanted to be a writer. As a kid, I dreamt of having a New York Times bestseller, kept countless journals, wrote hundreds of letters (which then turned into writing overly long emails) to friends, and scribbled notes whenever possible. But as I got older, “reality” was forced upon me. A few older mentors told me that being a writer was a fanciful dream, and the reality of it was far more harsh: to be a writer meant automatic hardship, mental and financial, and a lottery chance of success. In short, becoming a writer was not merely impractical but most likely impossible. I cast aside my childhood dream of being a writer for a more traditional and reliable desk job in marketing—if I couldn’t tell my own stories, I could be paid well to spin stories for brands in order to make more sales.
I did my job dutifully and practiced yoga to keep stress levels down from the breakneck speed of corporate startup culture. But then, in my midtwenties, fate landed me a desk job in the most unlikely of places: a climbing gym. I wasn’t good at climbing at first—a V3 seemed impossible, until, slowly, I got better. And by learning how to climb, I learned how to make the impossible possible. It was through climbing that I found myself and the courage to transition into becoming a real writer.
There is a special relationship between climbing and writing; both require stamina; courage; a careful planning of what you’ll do (and encourage spontaneous discovery, a stream of consciousness, and movement); and most importantly, an open, creative mind. Writers who want to improve their writing would do well to start rock climbing, and climbers who want to improve their skills on the rocks should try their hand at writing.
There is precedent to this mind-body connection. Writers have had a notoriously long-standing love affair with running: Murakami attributes his ability to wake up at 4:00 a.m. every morning and write for a continuous 5-hour block to his daily 10-kilometer run, Joyce Carol Oates is a lifelong runner who attributes the activity to her ability to tackle structural problems, Malcolm Gladwell runs to get “unstuck,” and novelist Don Dellio runs after four-hour blocks of writing “to shake off one world” and enter the next. As someone who has always been an athlete, I understand intimately the benefits of physical sport for the mental fortitude writing requires. But I hate running. It can be rough on the joints, is the least effective way to get fit, and is frankly just boring—it’s challenging in a very linear way. The meditative quality is indisputable, but then, runners usually need to be moving in order to still their minds, a crutch that I want nothing to do with.
Climbing and writing are both foundational skills that we learn at a young age—as we gain motor skills, we learn how to climb out of cribs, ascend stairs and ladders, and hone our spatial and directional awareness, balance, and agility. Learning to write with a pen or pencil is another significant fine-motor skill, which necessitates coordination of small muscles and movements of the hands, fingers, and eyes. For the most part, writing (communicating) and moving around the world are fundamental to existing in the modern world.
And yet, to call oneself a “writer,” one must take the craft of writing more seriously; one practices it daily, refines their skills, and creates something from nothing. Even those who write a lot struggle with when they can officially take on the title, in a similar vein of how there is a lot of debate of when one can call oneself a “climber” (or perhaps this is simply the neuroticism of writers applying this existential crisis to all other areas of their life, since, the authors of pieces in this zine who have questioned what it means to be a “climber” are all, undoubtedly, writers). I don’t wish to go down that philosophical rabbit hole, but instead propose simply that if you write, you are a writer. And if you climb, you are a climber. And if you only identify as one of the two, you should try the other.
From an early age, most people are categorized into mutually exclusive boxes: athletes, jocks, nerds, writers, punks, freaks. This leads to a world where people tend to prioritize either their mind, a life based on mental work and intellect, where physical activity and health comes second, or their body, a life anchored in manual labor and movement, where self-expression by way of language and communication are secondary. Basically, a world where people tend to either only work on their outer selves and bodies or people who only engage in interior investigation without paying their physical selves any mind.
To take this to the extreme, I am reminded of this David Foster Wallace essay called “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” where he writes about the allure of getting inside a mind of a sports prodigy, “because top athletes are profound, because they make a certain type of genius as carnally discernible as it ever can get, these ghost-written invitations inside their lives and their skulls are terribly seductive…the memoirs make a promise—to let us penetrate the indefinable mystery of what makes some persons geniuses, semi divine, to share with us the secret.” But the essay centers instead on his absolute crushing disappointment with that promise—Wallace found the memoir to be vapid, void of any real depth, and in the end concludes that what makes genius athletes so great is their ability to be in the moment. To be so completely focused that they think of nothing at all. Wallace then agonizes that his type of genius—the kind bestowed upon writers—can only truly “see, articulate and animate the experience of a gift we are denied,” thus categorically dividing the artist and the athlete. In Wallace’s world, and mind, the trope of the troubled, depressed artist is a truth and often too analytical and can get lost trying to decipher and express a moment because they cannot simply exist in the way that a great athlete can.
I would disagree with him and respectfully say that Wallace’s life could have benefitted from a bit of bouldering or sport. Dividing the artist and the athlete into two mutually exclusive stereotypes is far too limiting, and I believe to truly reach the highest form of self-expression as both an artist and an athlete, one needs to develop both the mind and body. Writing, like climbing, is often described as hard. To write a novel seems like an impossible feat, one so intimidating, one that can take years of dedication. To the layperson, climbing just a V5 or a 5.10 outside also seems unthinkable. But both are easily achievable with persistence. For me, writing was always a hobby, a passion I had relegated to morning routines because so many people had told me that it was too difficult, too impossible to make a living as a writer. It wasn’t until I began rock climbing that I realized that this wasn’t true at all.
How Climbing Made Me a Better Writer:
Acceptance of Rejection: Most people are afraid to do what they really want because they’re afraid of failure. It was always much easier to speak about my dreams of writing in the conditional tense: that I would write if I had the time, the money, the connections, or whatever, instead of just trying to do the damn thing and then having to say I failed. It’s more comforting to argue for your limitations than to face failure. But anyone who climbs knows that failure is woven into the fabric of the sport, and after a while, rejection is reduced to something that simply happens again and again before you succeed.
When I started climbing, I found myself getting shut down on the easiest gym climbs—but then I looked around and saw that most people were getting shut down on their projects. Writing is a far more solitary affair than climbing, and while I know any writer will talk about how rejection is also simply part of the job, it’s helpful to actually see other people struggle, struggle, and struggle some more before they succeed.
Persistence: To get better at climbing, the advice most people give to new climbers is simple: climb more, and climb a lot. Writing requires the same persistent engagement: one just has to string words together again and again, in one order, in a different way, backspace, delete, cut, copy, paste, and play with words until you find a flow that is comfortable. And just as learning technique is key to good climbing, it is the same for writing: you learn how to cut out unnecessary words for clarity (like cutting out unnecessary motion on the wall to save energy), how to effectively stake a (climbing) flag in the ground as metaphor, and the craft of telling stories (or, solving problems with a good start, middle, and finish).
Stamina + Flow State: Writing a lot and consistently can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be that hard. Nor does it have to take that much time. Unfortunately, most writer’s let Parkinson’s law dictate their work habits—the time it takes to complete a project expands to fill the time available for its completion. Climbing bouldering problems, especially, has taught me the importance of stamina: the ability to sustain prolonged physical or mental effort. When you climb, you hone your ability to focus because there is so much more at risk (falling on your ass from ten feet off the ground will do wonders for your powers of concentration). The ability to focus and reach a flow state is crucial to getting a lot done in writing. When I write, I usually aim to write anywhere from one thousand to three thousand words a day. I sit down and type furiously—turn off any distractions—and, without breaks, write until I hit my writing goal. And then edit from there.
Perspective and Project Changes: Meeting climbers from around the world illuminated all the different ways to live: namely, a life that didn’t consist of being chained to a laptop from nine to five. It gave me the courage to go freelance and to pursue writing full time. Another one of the most interesting aspects of climbing is to watch how differently people climb, how a variety of differently shaped and sized human bodies decide to configure and throw their limbs up a wall. Writing, too, is a fascinating exercise in how many different ways you can describe the same thing, especially if you are writing from the point of view of a character that is entirely invented or very different from your own. If you’re stuck on a problem in climbing, instead of trying the same thing over and over again, try the problem in a completely different manner. Or better yet, perhaps climb something else entirely.
Having Fun Is the Most Important Thing of All: So many writers tend to paint their own craft as torturous work. It is work, but it also can be pure fun: it’s a pure form of creation where you can also invent stories and pull people from thin air; it’s where you can play with words, dress them up, strip them down; and where you can even transcend laws of physics and time by connecting with another person in another part of the world entirely who will read your words later. Like climbers, many writers attach goals to their work—they want to write a chapbook, publish a zine, a novel, win a prize, get published in a prestigious magazine, all of which are fine goals. But climbing has taught me that the one climbing the best is the one who is having the most fun, and so while I always write with goals in mind, I always write even on the bad days. Even when tackling a part of a novel seems impossible, I write something else—a nonsensical list, a letter to a friend, the beginnings of another short story, morning pages of streams of consciousness, voices overheard in a dream. I write just for the pure fun of it.
How Writing Can Make Climbers Stronger:
Reduce Stress: Relax, being a “writer” is not for everyone—and that’s okay; I’m not asking you to be one. Simply keeping a journal, with no expectations of form or incredible penmanship or deep thoughts, can be good for your climbing. So whatever your preconceptions are of what being a writer means, toss it out: writing in this case simply means taking a pen to paper and putting down random thoughts. They don’t have to be pretty, polished, or well thought out; you just have to write about emotional or stressful events for “fifteen to twenty minutes” just once a month over a four-month period to reap benefits such as: lower blood pressure, better liver functionality, and a higher tolerance for stressful events. Climbing can be an extremely physically taxing sport—the more you can do to lower stress, the healthier you will be and the less likely you’ll be to get injured.
Get Out of Your Head by Getting It All Out of Your Head: Climbing can be a heady sport: if you’ve been working on a problem or route for a long time, all sorts of frustrations can arise, which can also dredge up some buried emotional trauma you keep pushing back down inside. Writing is a direct way to get out of your own head by just pushing out the thoughts. Morning pages are another form of journaling, first suggested by artist Julia Cameron in her infamous course The Artist’s Way. The concept is simple: when you get up, write three stream-of-consciousness pages of anything, by longhand. Literally anything and just let the pen flow, and then know at the end, you can toss, crumple, bury, or burn the pages, and nobody has to see them again, not even you. It can help you unleash creativity, process emotions, and most importantly: silence any inner critic by letting it talk and then symbolically giving its words no weight whatsoever.
Self-Analysis: I often think that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they climb. One of my friends is steady, so poised, and locks off everything. She rarely does dynamic moves because she doesn’t have to; she has dedicated so much time to climbing and training that her strength and finger grip is on another level entirely. The way she operates in real life mirrors her climbing—she is deliberate and chases after her goals with steel determination but rarely takes any risks. My own style is the opposite of hers; I tend to climb wildly, jumping with abandon, heel hooking everything, which is also how I lead my life: I’ve taken a lot of risks and gone for opportunities without knowing where I’d land. The benefit of self-analysis and actually trying to put your own climbing style and habits into words allows you to see the gaps in your own skill and identify areas in which you could improve.
Self-Expression: The next logical step of self-analysis is self-expression, and I think that athletes all inherently do this when they reach that flow state of their sport. By self-analysis and getting your thoughts out there on paper, you can really help find and refine your own voice and unique self: Who are you really in this world? Why do you climb the things that you do? And most importantly: what do you have to say? So many climbers emit guttural screams on the wall; it’s a primal sound that helps us perform, but to refine your voice, in speaking or in words, is to really dial down and be aware of who you are and what you stand for. If you don’t scream at all, try it. Scream and then write; write, then scream. It’s a good rest-day activity.
Of course, there are already so many people who climb and write—the publisher of this zine himself and all of the writers and climbers who have been published here. But just as the climbing world has been dominated by able-bodied people of a certain race and gender, the writing world has suffered as well for a lack of diverse voices. I hope that there will be more artist-athletes, people who don’t fit into any one set category, because they have discovered the boundless modes of human existence. For those who simply view their body as an instrument without any regard to the mind, they are nourishing only one side of themselves and neglecting their inner creativity—they are neglecting what it truly means to be human, which is to imagine the previously unimaginable.
And for those who simply view their body as a mere vehicle for their precious mind, they, too, are neglecting what it means to be human—that is, to move in this physical world with their physical expression. That could be any physical expression, not just climbing, but also dancing, yoga, martial arts, and fine, even running. Because if you only push your mind to the limits of what is possible, you are limiting your own vantage point and experience of the world. And when you push your body to an extreme or to a limit, along with a trained mind that can sustain difficult circumstances, without losing sight of your end goal, and most importantly, with imagination, you can do anything and shape your own narrative around what you’ve done. Perhaps if more athletes mastered the expression of their inner minds as much as they have control over their bodies, David Foster Wallace wouldn’t have had his heart broken. And just maybe, the pairing of a brilliant mind and body will be more the norm than the exception.
This piece is published in Volume 21. Score a copy or a bundle at our online store.
Cyrena Lee is a writer based in Paris. She is the author of the book A Little Bit of Lucid Dreaming, An Introduction to Dream Manipulation. To read more of her work, visit cyrena-lee.com.
